Scientifica Time Surfers - Nelson Thornes

Scientifica Time Surfers by Louise Petheram, Nelson Thornes 2004

This textbook, for 11-12 year old children, represents an extreme in the lengths it goes to to ridicule and misrepresent non-Darwinists. It contains a fictional interview with a creationist clergyman which bears little relation to fact.

Did humans evolve?

It is January 1860, and our interviewer is talking to Reverend P. Philips.

Interviewer: Good morning Reverend Philips. You are going to tell us where people first came from, aren’t you?

Rev P. Philips: That’s right. The Bible says people were created by God. We have studied the Bible stories and worked out that it happened in about 4000BC. People were created to look like God, and they haven’t changed since.

Interviewer: So what do you say to this man, Charles Darwin, who says human started as monkeys and took millions of years to change slowly into humans?

Rev P. Philips: The man should be whipped. His book should be burned. How dare he say that decent people are hardly any more than monkeys? It’s disgusting.

Interviewer: What about his ideas that black people and white people are just the same?

Rev P. Philips: It’s ridiculous. Have you ever seen a black person? They don’t even look like humans.

Interviewer: Well, your views are very interesting. Thank you for talking to us.

This fictional interview is followed by another in which “an expert on human evolution” reassures us that there is only one species of human. School children are left with the idea that non-Darwinians: cling to outdated ideas, are motivated only by religion, ignore the evidence, and may be racist. This is simply a straw man.

In 1860, a clergyman did question whether humans were descended from apes, and he was Samuel Wilberforce, whose Christian father had spent his entire political career in seeking the Abolition of Slavery. In contrast a prominent Darwinist, wrote this about Tasmanian Aborigines in 1870 :

The decline of the Tasmanians...should be viewed as a geological or paleontological fate: the stronger variety supplants the weaker. This extinction is sad in itself, but sadder still is the knowledge, that in this world the physical order treads down the moral order with every confrontation.

(Oscar Peschel, 1870, quoted in From Darwin to Hilter - Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany Richard Weikart, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Here, Darwinism is being used to explain why the extermination of Aborigines could be seen as part of the physical order of the world.

We might legitimately ask: why do textbook writers use valuable textbook space in misrepresenting alternative views to Darwinism, which many children will rarely have come across? Why not let children weigh up the evidence for Darwinism themselves?